On June 18, 2003, Jay Garner went to see Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to report on his brief tenure in Iraq as head of the postwar planning office. Throughout the invasion and the early days of the war, Garner, a retired Army lieutenant general, had struggled just to get his team into Iraq. Two days after he arrived, Rumsfeld called to tell him that L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer, a 61-year-old terrorism expert and protege of Henry A. Kissinger, would be coming over as the presidential envoy, effectively replacing Garner.
“We’ve made three tragic decisions,” Garner told Rumsfeld.
“Really?” Rumsfeld asked.
“Three terrible mistakes,” Garner said.
He cited the first two orders Bremer signed when he arrived, the first one banning as many as 50,000 members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party from government jobs and the second disbanding the Iraqi military. Now there were hundreds of thousands of disorganized, unemployed, armed Iraqis running around.
Third, Garner said, Bremer had summarily dismissed an interim Iraqi leadership group that had been eager to help the United States administer the country in the short term. “Jerry Bremer can’t be the face of the government to the Iraqi people. You’ve got to have an Iraqi face for the Iraqi people.”
Garner made his final point: “There’s still time to rectify this. There’s still time to turn it around.”
Rumsfeld looked at Garner for a moment with his take-no-prisoners gaze. “Well,” he said, “I don’t think there is anything we can do, because we are where we are.”
He thinks I’ve lost it, Garner thought. He thinks I’m absolutely wrong. Garner didn’t want it to sound like sour grapes, but facts were facts. “They’re all reversible,” Garner said again.
“We’re not going to go back,” Rumsfeld said emphatically.
Later that day, Garner went with Rumsfeld to the White House. But in a meeting with Bush, he made no mention of mistakes. Instead he regaled the president with stories from his time in Baghdad.
In an interview last December, I asked Garner if he had any regrets in not telling the president about his misgivings.
“You know, I don’t know if I had that moment to live over again, I don’t know if I’d do that or not. But if I had done that — and quite frankly, I mean, I wouldn’t have had a problem doing that — but in my thinking, the door’s closed. I mean, there’s nothing I can do to open this door again. And I think if I had said that to the president in front of Cheney and Condoleezza Rice and Rumsfeld in there, the president would have looked at them and they would have rolled their eyes back and he would have thought, ‘Boy, I wonder why we didn’t get rid of this guy sooner?’ “
“They didn’t see it coming,” Garner added. “As the troops said, they drank the Kool-Aid.”
There’s also some very interesting passages about the influence Henry Kissinger has had over Dick Cheney, notably pressing the argument that US troops should stick it out in Iraq and defeat the insurgency militarily before leaving. According to Woodward, Kissinger sees Iraq as another Vietnam, and thinks that Vietnam could have been won if the US had stayed longer. Senior military officials completely disagreed with this view, saying “we’ve got to get the fuck out.”
Finally, former White House Chief of Staff seems to have had a pretty accurate reading of the situation, even if he was unwilling to actually internalize it:
Card put it on the generals in the Pentagon and Iraq. If they had come forward and said to the president, “It’s not worth it,” or, “The mission can’t be accomplished,” Card was certain, the president would have said “I’m not going to ask another kid to sacrifice for it.”
Card was enough of a realist to see that there were two negative aspects to Bush’s public persona that had come to define his presidency: incompetence and arrogance. Card did not believe that Bush was incompetent, and so he had to face the possibility that, as Bush’s chief of staff, he might have been the incompetent one. In addition, he did not think the president was arrogant.
But the marketing of Bush had come across as arrogant. Maybe it was unfair in Card’s opinion, but there it was.
He was leaving. And the man he considered most responsible for the postwar troubles, the one who should have gone, Rumsfeld, was staying.
Even The Economist, which in 2002/2003 was largely pro-war and pro-Bush (and is now eating humble pie), had called for Rumsfeld to resign on its cover. One of the lessons of the Bush presidency will be that, as well as all the corruption, pork-barreling for big industry and ideological blindness, Bush’s personality will have been a key to his policy failures: he is a man unable to admit mistakes or consider that he may have been wrong. He confuses arrogance and groundless optimism with dogged resolve. You can imagine these meetings with the president, surrounded by his favorite yes-men, singing the Monty Python song “Always look on the bright side of life” in unison as they are delivered pessimistic report after pessimistic report from the uniformed professionals in Iraq. What a catastrophe.
Craven cowards, one and all. I think Rummy got it wrong- he should have said, “we are what we are.”
Woodward’s description of Kissinger’s role and especially the line “Kissinger sees Iraq as another Vietnam, and thinks that Vietnam could have been won if the US had stayed longer” suggests that the old Cold Warriors had more to do with the Iraq war than is generally believed. Or at least that the paleocons took over pretty quickly from the neos in planning strategy once the decision to go to war had been made.
One thing that’s still confusing about this, however, is the mismatch between Rumsfeld’s lean mean army approach and the old we-coulda-won-Vietnam-with-more-staying-power mindset.
SP, I think Kissinger started coming into the picture only after Iraq started going badly, so the old Cold Warriors probably did not have much to do with Iraq. Again I guess I have to take a look at the full book for the details. To be honest I don’t fully trust Woodward considering his past PR for the Bush administration and his prolonged silence on the Valerie Plame affair until recently, when he said Richard Armitage had told him about her a long time before Robert Novak published his column.
As for Rumsfeld, I think that his lean approach applied to the beginning of the occupation but is no longer relevant today. After all, more and more of the National Guard are being called to serve in Iraq and troops from Afghanistan have been diverted to there. The Bush administration obviously now realizes the lean approach was a mistake, but since then troop levels in Iraq have become a political issue and they have to accept some level of troop withdrawal, or at least preventing the same troops serving tour after tour in Iraq. I think most experts now agree more troops are needed, but that is clashing with domestic political pressure to “bring the boys home” — which is why the whole “it’s time for the Iraqis to fight this war” meme has been increasingly prominent over the past year, even though I understand from media reports and people I’ve spoken to with insight into the situation (military types) that the Iraqi army is actually quite behind schedule in terms of being an effective counter-insurgency force. (Never mind the issue of who’s in control and that there are several groups to fight, not just the Sunni insurgency, such as the infamous “Interior Ministry Shia death squads” that have been responsible for quite a few massacres in the Baghdad area.)